Many phone apps are as addictive as the pokies. How to restore your shredded mind

Mobile phone addiction is a real thing, with many apps explicitly designed to be addictive. We reveal expert tips for restoring your concentration and mental health.

Mobile phone addiction is a serious health issue.

Mobile phones are the most disruptive and revolutionising pieces of technology of the past half-century. But for many people, the inability to disconnect and put them down is having a corrosive effect on our lives.

Too much phone use is interrupting our sleep, shredding our ability to concentrate, and interrupting our social connections, to the point where for some people, it’s distancing us emotionally to a damaging extent from spouses and children.

If you feel addicted to your phone, if you know you shouldn’t look at it late at night but find yourself scrolling in bed, if you can’t go five minutes without checking emails or social media, if you’d dearly love to get immersed in a book but can’t find the headspace, or if you’re trying to manage all of these issues for your teenage child, read on – we’re going to give you tips from the experts on how to break the cycle of constant scrolling, reclaim your concentration and sense of wellbeing, and deepen your relationship with yourself and others.

But simply putting down the phone won’t work. You need to replace those constant quick hits of dopamine that many of the apps your phone are explicitly designed to deliver, and create an environment for your brain via other pursuits. But first, let’s try and understand what’s going on and why so many of us struggle to put down the phone.

What scrolling does to your brain

Psychiatrist Ian Hickie explains that one of the reasons it’s so hard for some people to put their phone down is the constant reinforcement many apps provide, that keep the brain in a state of seeking and obtaining constant rewards.

“It’s called intermittent reinforcement,” says Professor Hickie, co-director of health and health policy at the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Centre, who discussed the phenomenon in a recent podcast. “They use visual cues, they use audio cues, they provide constant updates. It’s exactly like pokies.

“Mobile phones are extremely attention-grabbing and that is very arousing for the brain. But our systems are not built to be excited 24/7. And many people end up in a chronic arousal situation, a chronically stressed situation, and then people don’t sleep, they don’t turn off, their brain doesn’t restore and back up.

“But there are also other health consequences of this state of chronic arousal when systems don’t flip over into a restorative phase. There’s a ‘wear out’ effect, a kind of burnout.”

The consequences of this constant state of “switch-on” or arousal – induced particularly when phones are used in the hours before bed, extending the window of time in which the body is exposed to light and thus altering the body-clock that is so crucial to mental and physiological regulation – could be extensive, according to Professor Hickie.

“The extent to which night-time light exposure is associated with an increased rate of mental health problems is significant,” Professor Hickie says. The problem is it’s turning the system on or keeping the system on when it should be off. It’s keeping all of those cortisone, adrenaline, immune factors on when they should be off.

Professor Ian Hickie of The Brain and Mind Institute says excessive mobile phone use is destroying our health Picture: Bob Finlayson.

“And the downstream effects of that, it could lead to premature ageing, impaired immune function over time, or in the long term potential increased risk of cancer when immune surveillance fails. And the increased adrenaline, sympathetic nervous system sort of stuff can increase the risk of hypertension, heart disease, premature cardiovascular disease. And because you’re wearing out your brain, there may be an increased risk of dementia. So you’ve got all these kind of accelerated ageing, degenerative processes accelerating, because you’re not dealing with the restorative processes on a 24-hour cycle.”

Author David Gillespie, a lawyer and researcher, agrees there is no doubt phone use can be an addiction for some people, primarily via social media apps.

“The phone is just a platform for multiple things designed to deliver addiction,” says Gillespie, the author of the book Brain Reset. “Addiction is our reward system going wrong, it occurs when you overstimulate our reward system.

“Social media is explicitly engineered to be addictive, firstly through the ‘like’ mechanism and the endless browse mechanisms. That gives us a reward shot of dopamine through a mechanism called oxytocin, which makes us feel good. We get the same thing when we get a hug from someone, but social media delivers the reward at a high speed and frequency.

“And whether it’s drugs, porn, gambling, whatever, it does the same thing, because it uses exactly the same mechanism in the brain, it changes our set-point, so that we become accustomed to those hits. So the brain adjusts upwards our threshold for what we need to be stimulated, and we want more and more and more of the thing that’s delivering the addictive hit.

“That change in our biochemistry, that change in our brain is a semipermanent one. The science is absolutely clear that if we change the thresholds in parts of the brain, we’re more likely to be anxious, more likely to be depressed, and more likely to be unable to focus. It’s a very, very big problem that we are handing people mechanisms which deliver addiction 24-hours a day, in their pocket. And it is no surprise to discover that rates of anxiety and depression are accelerating wildly in today’s society.”

How to break cycle of overstimulation and restore equilibrium

Breaking the cycle of overstimulation and obsessive phone use is not as simple as putting the device down. Chances are that won’t work anyway. The best strategy is to replace all of that time you were spending scrolling and checking likes or emails with a different activity …. but not just watching TV or bingeing on Netflix. We’re talking about slow, restorative, immersive activities that restore that sense of concentration that is so nourishing to the brain and encourages the wind-down process that is crucial in the couple of hours before bedtime.

“The things to replace phone use with are the things that stimulate dopamine but in a healthy way,” says Gillespie. “So some things that stimulate dopamine are intense focus. Find something where you can be absorbed and entirely focused on for say, an hour at a time, without stray thoughts entering your head, it might be building model airplanes, it might be knitting, it might be yoga, whatever it is. If you can get to that state where your brain is entirely focused on that thing, then you are effectively substituting the dopamine hit that you get from the addiction.”

Hickie agrees. “To maintain those synaptic connections in the complex, creative parts of the brain, you need to use them. It’s a use it or lose it type of situation. And the mental health benefits are enormous. Utilising these parts of the brain are connected to developing a really strong sense of who you are, a sense of perspective and a sense of your relationship with yourself and in the world. It’s a sense of going inside your own world. And the stress arousal response goes down, but in a really creative way.”

So it doesn’t really matter what type of hobby or activity puts you in this state of mind, as long as it’s something you can lose yourself in. If you choose reading, it doesn’t matter if it’s Dostoevski or airport trash, as long as it carries your mind away and absorbs you.

Here’s a list of suggestions for the best activities to restore your mind and replace your phone. Experts suggest starting with putting the phone down for just ten minutes at a time, and slowly extending it.

• Establish a yoga practice
• Go for a walk in nature
• Learn a musical instrument
• Learn a language
• Take up crocheting or knitting
• Join a team and play team sport
• Take a pottery course
• Play board games with your family
• Keep a daily journal or write letters to friends, preferably in longhand on pen and paper
• Bake cakes or sourdough bread
• Take up study (even if you’re reading or writing on a laptop, this is a much deeper sense of engagement than many other activities we do on laptops and screens)